Sounding Objects

Sounding Objects PDF Author: Carla Zecher
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802090141
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Often abstracted by the aesthetic implications of music itself, musical instruments can be seen as physical signifiers apart from the music that they produce. In Sounding Objects, Carla Zecher studies the representation of musical instruments in French Renaissance poetry and art, arguing that the efficacy of these material objects as literary and pictorial images was derived from their physical characteristics and acoustic properties, as well as from their aesthetic product. Sounding Objects is concerned with ways in which musical culture provided poets with a rich, nuanced vocabulary for reflecting on their own art and its roles in courtly life, the civic arena, and salon society. Poets not only depicted the world of musical practice but also appropriated it, using musical instruments figuratively to establish their literary identities. Drawing on music treatises and archival sources as well as poems, paintings, and engravings, this unique study aims to enrich our understanding of the interplay of poetry, music, and art in this period, and highlights the importance of musical materiality to Renaissance culture.

Sounding Objects

Sounding Objects PDF Author: Carla Zecher
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 0802090141
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
Often abstracted by the aesthetic implications of music itself, musical instruments can be seen as physical signifiers apart from the music that they produce. In Sounding Objects, Carla Zecher studies the representation of musical instruments in French Renaissance poetry and art, arguing that the efficacy of these material objects as literary and pictorial images was derived from their physical characteristics and acoustic properties, as well as from their aesthetic product. Sounding Objects is concerned with ways in which musical culture provided poets with a rich, nuanced vocabulary for reflecting on their own art and its roles in courtly life, the civic arena, and salon society. Poets not only depicted the world of musical practice but also appropriated it, using musical instruments figuratively to establish their literary identities. Drawing on music treatises and archival sources as well as poems, paintings, and engravings, this unique study aims to enrich our understanding of the interplay of poetry, music, and art in this period, and highlights the importance of musical materiality to Renaissance culture.

Musical Notation in the West

Musical Notation in the West PDF Author: James Grier
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009038230
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
Musical notation is a powerful system of communication between musicians, using sophisticated symbolic, primarily non-verbal means to express musical events in visual symbols. Many musicians take the system for granted, having internalized it and their strategies for reading it and translating it into sound over long years of study and practice. This book traces the development of that system by combining chronological and thematic approaches to show the historical and musical context in which these developments took place. Simultaneously, the book considers the way in which this symbolic language communicates to those literate in it, discussing how its features facilitate or hinder fluent comprehension in the real-time environment of performance. Moreover, the topic of musical as opposed to notational innovation forms another thread of the treatment, as the author investigates instances where musical developments stimulated notational attributes, or notational innovations made practicable advances in musical style.

Secular Renaissance Music

Secular Renaissance Music PDF Author: Sean Gallagher
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351549367
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 802

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Book Description
Secular music of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries encompasses an extraordinarily wide range of works and practices: courtly love songs, music for civic festivities, instrumental music, entertainments provided by minstrels, the unwritten traditions of solo singing, and much else. This collection of essays addresses many of these practices, with a focus on polyphonic settings of vernacular texts, examining their historical and stylistic contexts, their transmission in written and printed sources, questions of performance, and composers? approaches to text setting. Essays have been selected to reflect the wide range of topics that have occupied scholars in recent decades, and taken together, they point to the more general significance of secular music within a broad complex of cultural practices and institutions.

The Voice of Virtue

The Voice of Virtue PDF Author: Melinda Latour
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0197529747
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 377

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Book Description
The Voice of Virtue illuminates the musical practices at the heart of the Neostoic movement that spread across French lands during the Wars of Religion in the latter half of the sixteenth century. Guided by twin reparative traditions granting music and philosophy therapeutic power, composers and performers across the embattled Catholic and Protestant confessions turned to moral song as a means of repairing personal and collective virtue damaged by the ongoing conflict. Moral song collections enlarged interest in Stoic philosophy by circulating its ethical program to a broader audience through attractive paraphrases of Stoic maxims set to music. Even more importantly, this skillfully composed repertoire of polyphonic song offered a multi-sensory moral practice that would have resonated powerfully for those well-versed in the paradoxes of the Stoic tradition. Bringing together a repertoire of little-known music prints, a rich visual culture, and an impressive body of literary and philosophical sources, The Voice of Virtue not only illuminates the influence of Stoicism on music, but also reveals that we cannot fully understand Neostoicism as an intellectual or cultural movement without accounting for its vibrant musical sounds. Virtue, as voiced in these Stoic practices, proves to be both rational and fully invested in the sensory processes of the singing body.

John Dowland

John Dowland PDF Author: K. Dawn Grapes
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351580515
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 237

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Book Description
John Dowland: A Research and Information Guide offers the first comprehensive guide to the musical works and literature on one of the major composers of the English Renaissance. Including a catalog of works, discography of recordings, extensive annotated bibliography of secondary sources, and substantial indexes, this volume is a major reference tool for all those interested in Dowland's works and place in music history, and a valuable resource for researchers of Renaissance and English music.

Instrumentalists and Renaissance Culture, 1420-1600

Instrumentalists and Renaissance Culture, 1420-1600 PDF Author: Victor Coelho
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107145805
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
This is the first in-depth study in any language exploring the vast cultural range of instrumental music during the Renaissance.

Echoing Helicon

Echoing Helicon PDF Author: Tim Shephard
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199936145
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
The private studioli of Italian rulers are among the most revealing interior spaces of the Renaissance. In them, ideals of sober recreation met with leisured reality in the construction of a private princely identity performed before the eyes of a select public. The decorative schemes installed in such rooms were carefully designed to prompt, facilitate and validate the performances through which that identity was constituted. Echoing Helicon reconstructs, through the (re)interpretation of painted and intarsia decoration, the role played by music, musicians and musical symbolism in those performances. Drawing examples from the Este dynasty - despotic rulers of Ferrara throughout the Renaissance who employed such musicians as Pietrobono, Tromboncino and Willaert, and such artists as Tura, Mantegna and Titian - author Tim Shephard reaches new conclusions about the integration of musical and visual arts within the courtly environment of renaissance Italy, and about the cultural work required of music and of images by those who paid for them. Relying on Renaissance-era source material from a wide range of disciplines as well as new approaches derived from critical and cultural theory, Shephard provides a fresh look at the music of this ninety-year period of the Italian Renaissance. While much has been written about the studiolo by historians of art and architecture, it has only recently become a growing area of interest among musicologists. As the first English language monograph devoted to the music of the studiolo, Echoing Helicon is a significant contribution to this developing area of research and essential reading for both musicologists and art historians specializing in the Italian Renaissance.

Music and Power at the Court of Louis XIII

Music and Power at the Court of Louis XIII PDF Author: Peter Bennett
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108830633
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
A study of the strategies by which sacred music and liturgy was used to legitimate Louis XIII's power.

Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France

Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France PDF Author: Kate van Orden
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022676799X
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
In this groundbreaking new study, Kate van Orden examines noble education in the arts to show how music contributed to cultural and social transformation in early modern French society. She constructs a fresh account of music's importance in promoting the absolutism that the French monarchy would fully embrace under Louis XIV, uncovering many hitherto unpublished ballets and royal ceremonial performances. The great pressure on French noblemen to take up the life of the warrior gave rise to bellicose art forms such as sword dances and equestrian ballets. Far from being construed as effeminizing, such combinations of music and the martial arts were at once refined and masculine-a perfect way to display military prowess. The incursion of music into riding schools and infantry drills contributed materially to disciplinary order, enabling the larger and more effective armies of the seventeenth century. This book is a history of the development of these musical spheres and how they brought forth new cultural priorities of civility, military discipline, and political harmony. Music, Discipline, and Arms in Early Modern France effectively illustrates the seminal role music played in mediating between the cultural spheres of letters and arms.

Music and Culture in Late Renaissance Italy

Music and Culture in Late Renaissance Italy PDF Author: Iain Fenlon
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780198164449
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
Explores the role of music in the cultural, religious, and political upheavals of late Renaissance Italy, revealing how musical activity of all kinds was instrumentalized by those in power. Italian culture did not lose its vigour after 1530, but underwent a transformation.